Thanks for stopping by. Yahoo will report earnings after the close, and we’ll hang around through the conference call that gets under way at 5 p.m. ET. Yahoo earlier this year began showing video telecasts of the calls, so you can watch that in the video embedded above.

In addition to the evolving on-camera presentation skills of Chief Finance Officer Ken Goldman, we’ll be watching for a couple of points. The Journal’s Douglas MacMillan wrote about a few of them here, and we’ll go over them in the following posts.

Revenue is always an important indicator. For Yahoo, we’ll be watching for breakouts on advertising revenue. Yahoo has been doing a good job getting more people to its websites — the company’s stable of properties topped Google with 197 million visitors, according to comScore. And Yahoo has been putting a lot of elbow grease into refreshing popular destinations like Mail and Sports, while launching new apps like the Yahoo News Digest.

CEO Marissa Mayer has maintained that Yahoo’s goal is to build up the house first, then the visitors will come, and then the ad dollars will follow. Those ad dollars haven’t followed yet.

Yahoo’s cash position is also an important area to look at. The company has been on a spree of acquisitions in the past few quarters, part of Mayer’s effort to bring fresh talent into the fold. Yahoo also had costly exist of its second-in-command, Henrique de Castro. Previously launched stock buybacks have also eaten into Yahoo’s cash pile.

On the previous conference call for third-quarter earnings, Goldman said Yahoo was comfortable with about $3 billion in cash. As of September, the company had about $1.83 billion in cash and short-term investments — its lowest reserves since 2004.

One more topic to put on your radar: Alibaba, in which Yahoo has a 24% stake. A lot of Yahoo’s perceived value is tied up in the Chinese e-commerce company, which is expected to hold an initial public offering this year. Investors will be looking for signs that Alibaba is keeping up its strong growth of quarters past.

Yahoo’s stock has been on fire since Mayer came on board in 2012. Today, the stock finished trading on Wall Street at around $38.23 a share — up 4.3%. After hours, the stock was up another 2%, but now the numbers are out. Let’s see.

Investors have digested the earnings report, and shares are down nearly 6% after hours. Mayer’s tenure at Yahoo so far has been described in terms of being in a honeymoon. When the honeymoon period ends is the question. We’ll likely see some pressing questions on the call about why display ads are down.

Here’s the first earnings article from Douglas MacMillan and Michael Calia. The high-level takeaway is that the turnaround isn’t really turning around, or at least not fast enough. Overall revenue was lower, and so was revenue when blocking out those payments to partners. The drop in display-ad revenue is particularly biting since that makes up some 41% of the company’s overall revenue.

The conference call doesn’t get under way for another 30 minutes. In the Yahoo press release, Mayer said she was “encouraged” by the results for the quarter and the full-year overall. She touted the efforts to redesign websites and apps, mentioning Mail, Finance and Flickr. Like last quarter, she touted the increase in visitor traffic as a sign that those refreshes are working.

But talk about sweet and salty: After the optimistic opening quote from Mayer, the press release launches into a series of revenue numbers followed by a string of “decrease,” “decrease,” decrease.”

On the flip side, profit is up 28% for the quarter and 4% for the full year.

This is becoming a quarterly game of “memory”: which of these acquisitions do you recall? Yahoo says it acquired Aviate (ThumbsUp Labs), PeerCDN (Instant IO), Evntlive, Ptch, SkyPhrase, LookFlow, Bread Labs and Hitpost.

Yahoo also called out its other acquisitions, its flashiest acquihires, David Pogue for a new tech site, Matt Bai as a political columnist, and Kate Couric as a news anchor.

A little more on the ads: The number sold was up about 3%, while the price per ad fell about 7%. Those numbers don’t include results from Korea. Yahoo shut down its operations in South Korea in 2012, so it strips out those results to make a smoother comparison of the business.

Last quarter, I noticed that Yahoo’s company Twitter account was tweeting some well-timed info alongside the call. The account, quiet since Jan. 16, awoke from its slumber this afternoon. You can follow them here. Also, I’m giving Yahoo the early crown for best conference call music. A chummy, whistling tune.

A note on cash: Yahoo’s earnings report lists cash and marketable securities of around $5 billion, down from $6 billion a year earlier. But that’s a longer term look at cash, not the amount of cash and short term investments on hand. If someone can show me the way to that number, that’d be great. I’m hoping it comes up on the call.

The conference call is under way. We’re going through the usual announcements about risk factors and forward-looking statements and whatnot. Yahoo’s business reporter, Michael Santoli, will be along for the ride.

Mayer is talking through the core parts of the business, such as search and communications. She called out the Aviate acquisition and is touting the app refreshes. She points out that Yahoo listens to its users. Basically, Yahoo Mail users freaked out when the company took away the tabs, so Yahoo put them back.

Yahoo Finance, an app for making animated gifs, some new digital magazines — Mayer is walking through where all of that refresh effort is going. Part of that is touting the editorial effort going into some of these properties. Mayer is throwing out some numbers in the millions that sound okay but are hard to judge in a box.

The final area is video, with a shot out to ABC News and their joint effort to stream the State of the Union address tonight. (Meantime, Goldman must be ready togo cause he keeps clearing his throat off camera. Bring it on!)

Mayer is talking about Tumblr, a name that was largely absent from the earnings announcement. Tumblr users are up, time spent is up, number of posts is up. But is there any revenue generation there? No word.

Mayer says hiring was a real focus in early 2013, and the video slide included the number of applications the company is receiving. That’s an odd thing to point out, how many people want to work there. But remember that the knock on Yahoo before Mayer got there was that it was a depressing, dreadful place to work. Morale was a big part of her early focus.

Goldman says the volume of traffic is turning into growth. He says yes, display ads is lower but that rate of descent is follow. The drop in price-per ads was because Yahoo sold fewer of its “premium” ads.

Goldman is going through the outlook for the first quarter. It’s in the earnings slides.

The numbers disappeared — someone accidentally pulled the powerpoint out of display mode to show a messy icon-strewn desktop. Clean that up! Not to be petty, but this is what happens when you go for a slick video production over the usual humdrum audio scrum. Still a fan of the video.

Mayer is walking through some 2013 areas of growth: mobile, social, native and video. I missed what exactly the growth is in — users? revenue? something else? — and Mayer is talking about various metrics. But here was the accompanying tweet:

Mayer addressed de Castro’s exit, which was surprising. I thought she would demur. “Ultimately Henrique was not a fit,” she said, calling it “regrettable.” Yahoo isn’t planning to fill the position, and Mayer is going to get more hands on with revenue.

Goldman says the patent strategy will continue as it has. Next question is on where traffic is coming from. Mayer says mobile. In both desktop and mobile, finance, sports and weather are seeing engagement. And mail. So these are the “core four” of Yahoo.

Other question was on buybacks. Goldman says Yahoo is thoughtful on price and likes to buy back. Will be active in 2014, sensitive to price. Yahoo has had quite a run up, but no price line in the sand.

An emailed question asks why Tumblr isn’t better integrated with the rest of Yahoo. Mayer says editors are reblogging Tumblr posts into Yahoo Food, for example. Shame on emailer for not asking more than one question.

“You are working very hard to get me to raise the number,” Goldman jokes. This year, makes more sense to give guidance for the first quarter. They are taking it a quarter at a time on guidance. That’s one way to not create a negative headline every quarter about lowering guidance. (Someone check me on this, but I think Google also takes it quarter by quarter in terms of guidance.)

Goldman says the bulk of the 2013 acquisitions were about talent — acqui-hires — but not about growth. At the back half of 2013 Tumblr had some revenue. But otherwise, 2013 wasn’t about acquiring growth. Mayer steps in to say that the people acquired, mind you, added the talent that helped shore up traffic at those refreshed products.

Goldman says Yahoo is looking at future acquisitions that can be accretive to growth. (I would hope.)

Might Yahoo revive its own search platform, or is the company wholly dependent on Microsoft? (Haymaker question.) And another tough question on costs and staffing. Mayer defers to “long” statement. Platform was shut down. She says Yahoo is managing its headcount through attrition, for example, mobile went from 100 people to 500, for example, without changing the overall number of employees.

Goldman says “fair question.” Yahoo is trying to be more efficient. But as Yahoo is working on growth, it is adding in some areas. “You will see us get smarter on expenses … we are not forgetting,” Goldman says. But “we are behind in some areas,” and the only way to counter that is investing.

A follow up on Henrique de Castro. What wasn’t achieved? Mayer demurs here, smartly, “out of respect.” Mayer reiterates she wants more hands on control over sales and the like. It”s a flatter org now, which will lead to better execution.

Mayer ends the call by showing the recap in the form of the Yahoo News Digest, which was born of the Summly acquisition. How slick of them. Though I am pretty sure the picture of Mayer and Goldman at the top wasn’t from this call. Something to work on for next time.

That’s a wrap. It was an interesting call but few fireworks and a lot of the same questions and thoughts that we had at the end of the previous quarter. We’re waiting for the Alibaba IPO. Revenue is falling — overall and display, at least; search revenue is rising — but Yahoo maintains this is a ship that is in the process of turning around.

Mayer, who has now wrapped up her first full calendar year as Yahoo CEO, is sticking with its plan: hire people, build better services, get more customers, then turn it all into more ad engagement and revenue. Mobile was the company’s shining example of moving in a better direction.

Yahoo was clear that 2013 was about shoring up the talent base and attacking the broad portfolio of products with redesigns and refreshes. The coming year will be about fewer but bigger changes. How long with investors give Mayer?

Yahoo’s consolidated financial statements are live. You can check them out here. Looking at the assets, Yahoo has $3.4 billion in cash and short-term securities. That’s well up from $1.8 billion a quarter ago and halts a steady decline in the cash pile.

Goldman says $3 billion is the amount Yahoo wants to keep on hand, and the company is sitting tidily above that level again.

Another highlight of the call was Yahoo’s next steps now that de Castro has left the building: the company is not replacing him, at least not in the same way. The work will be divided among the team, with Mayer getting her hands more dirty on the sales side. It makes sense. She has to show more progress on the advertising side this year — de Castro was Yahoo’s top ad executive and a liaison to marketers — so she is taking a hands-on approach. There was no discussion about the how costly de Castro’s exit was.

Looking through Yahoo’s charts, you get a sense of just how critical the Alibaba stake has been to Yahoo. This is under the “earnings in equity interests” slide. For the period ending in September — the latest available — revenue from the stake was up 51% and profit was up 58%. But as Doug MacMillan points out, those numbers — impressive as they are — are down from the preceding quarters. That growth is slowing.

Comments (5 of 17)

The new yahoo Mail "improvements are ill-conceived and user Unfriendly.

Yahoo Mail is FUBAR !!!

7:58 pm January 28, 2014

Jimmy wrote:

Marissa Mayer needs to get her voice back... literally. She needs to rest her vocal chords:

Google: Marissa Mayer Needs To Get Her Voice Back

6:35 pm January 28, 2014

Yahoo wrote:

Hope and Change. We will change the world. Sounds familiar?

6:32 pm January 28, 2014

Bill wrote:

I might feel better about Yahoo if she could find it within herself to smile. Then again, as an investor I am very partial to enthusiasm and will always be perplexed as to why anyone would invest in a company managed by a CEO who doesn't appear to be enjoying his/her job. Turnarounds work much better when CEO's bleed excitement. It's contagious.

6:24 pm January 28, 2014

Tom wrote:

Based on the "improvements' that yahoo made to really screw up yahoo Mail, and the way they shoved them down the throats of their users, I would SELL every share of yahoo I owned.

Yahoo's earning are DOWN and will continue to go DOWN. SELL !!!

Now yahoo is delivering mail very late or not at all.

Yahoo's whole attitude has changed for the negative toward their users.
They have lost mail subscribers.

I will NOT BUY anything from any of their advertisers anymore.

If they treat their mail users like trash, I will NOT BUY anything from any company that advertises on yahoo.